


A Necessary Evil

by armchairaloof



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Ahsoka Tano-centric, F/M, Gen, cassian andor learned his war crimes from somewhere, set during S1/S2 Rebels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 01:06:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28734663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/armchairaloof/pseuds/armchairaloof
Summary: Fulcrum, between Rebels episodes.
Relationships: Ahsoka Tano & Darth Vader, CT-7567 | Rex/Ahsoka Tano, Hera Syndulla & Ahsoka Tano, Kanan Jarrus & Ahsoka Tano, Kanan Jarrus/Hera Syndulla
Comments: 15
Kudos: 68





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Pretty nervous about this one, friends! This is a different kind of story than I'm used to writing, in several ways. But- trying new things, ahh! I hate just regurgitating strict canon, but I am also not very confident in making ‘in universe’ crap up. So I got tired of being stuck in that whole catch-22 and here we are. I’m calling this canon… adjacent? But also, because I'm weak, there will be some rexsoka eventually. This will follow Ahsoka from around the time she first pops up in Rebels and leading up to Malachor (hopefully).
> 
> First up, pre- S1 finale arc.

Ahsoka dropped her small transport out of hyperspace and immediately knew two things.

One, her target was dead.

The boy’s presence in the Force was gone. A whisper of pain and fear the second before her ship dropped out of hyperspace and then nothing.

And two, the Inquisitor who’d killed him was still on board.

That Force signature was more familiar to her. Maybe not the exact person behind the mask. But the darkness, yes. She knew who trained them, that hulking mass of black plastoid-covered Sith they called Vader. His cruelty bled into his Inquisitors and bound them together. It didn’t matter who they’d been before or what they called themselves now.

Ahsoka had only met her target, a slight human boy, once before. He was maybe ten or twelve; for a Force sensitive child to make it past early childhood at all was impressive, though likely didn’t come without cost. She’d passed him by chance in a crowded market and felt his Force presence like a beacon through a storm. But his parents, or she assumed that’s who the two humans were to the child, had been skittish. They barely allowed her to give them a comm frequency to contact her by. She’d offered a data stick with the frequency and watched in dismay as the older human male snatched it out of her hands and it disappeared in the folds of his ragged clothing, all while he looked around the square furtively as if someone was watching. She’d honestly expected him to throw it away as soon as he got a chance.

But then out of nowhere, she’d gotten a call that they were ready to talk. They sounded terrified and desperate, but determined. Ahsoka didn’t know if they were more scared of what they were running to or from, so she didn’t ask.

If she was right, and the family had been bouncing around systems to stay off radars, Imperial and Rebel alike, their deaths may have been a long time coming. It was a dangerous time to be a Force user, and Inquisitors occupied just the topmost position on a long list of dangers that awaited the boy.

Or it was her fault.

She’d found him first after all, and what were the odds that an Inquisitor happened to come across this stretch of empty space they’d chosen as a rendezvous by chance? But there’d be time for questions and guilt later.

Another quarter turn around the old freighter the doomed family had been traveling in and a still-docked TIE was revealed.

In another time, or another life, she would have said a few pretty Jedi words about returning to the cosmic Force. She would have promised herself that she’d come back to these coordinates to tow the freighter to the nearest planet, so their bodies wouldn’t be floating in the vacuum of space for eternity. But this wasn’t that time or that life anymore.

She quickly restarted the hyperdrive and manually overrode several sequences to speed up the process. The engine whirred and creaked in protest at being asked to work again so soon after dropping into realspace. Her ship, while scrappy, was not a fighter. Heavily armed ships drew too much attention in the places Ahsoka frequented in her work and that wasn’t what she did anymore either. There was no use in fighting, not out in the open. These days the real work got done in the shadows. So she became a shadow.

And shadows knew when to run.

The Inquisitor’s ship detached from the freighter and turned to face her transport.

“ _Well, who do we have here?_ ” They were broadcasting on a wideband comm channel. Ahsoka paid it no mind. A distraction technique she rarely needed to employ herself, but recognized well.

“ _How interesting_ ,” the voice continued. Ahsoka felt the Inquisitor reach out and probe her Force presence, like a cold hand jabbing her mental shields. “ _And here I thought my prize would be the untrained pissant I just dispatched, but a fully trained_ Jedi _… Yes, my master will be pleased.”_

Ahsoka ignored the modulated voice and focused on the ship’s controls. The hyperdrive came to life and she made the calculations to the nearest system she could think of, punching the buttons to engage with hands shaking with barely controlled adrenaline.

Just as the ship lurched forward into lightspeed, she saw the TIE swivel and shoot. Her transport made the jump, but alarms blared in the cockpit even as the stars elongated and bled into the blue of hyperspace. The escape didn’t last, and all too soon Ahsoka was knocked forward in her seatbelt as the ship was forcibly dropped out.

“R4, can you make sense of this and get a lock on our position?” she asked her droid who was already running calculations on their failed jump. “I have a feeling we’re going to have company soon.”

Her viewscreen was consumed by the image of a planet looming ahead and rapidly approaching. Thick storm clouds curled around it, covering the surface, and a ring of space dust haloed the planet. R4 quickly brought up their position in the nav computer and she cursed when she saw that the planet’s orbit was pulling them in. The air would be breathable on this planet, if she survived a landing that is. But she wouldn’t want to be stuck here for longer than a few rotations. The brief write-up in the nav file said the storms she was seeing were a constant feature and, indeed, covered the whole planet.

Ahsoka scanned the viewport and saw the TIE careening toward her. She must not have jumped more than half a parsec for it to catch up so quickly. But luck was on her side for the first time today. The Inquisitor underestimated the gravity well of the planet and slammed right into one of its rings. Ice and asteroid pieces collided with the TIE’s hull as it spun uselessly to avoid the debris.

Now they were both stuck in the planet’s orbit, and soon enough Ahsoka felt the steering mechanisms stop responding. Both her small transport and the TIE were no match for this gravity and she stopped fighting it as soon as she saw that the chances of escape were gone. Her ship was forced into a rapidly decaying orbit, the Inquisitor still trailing in her wake. If Ahsoka died on some unnamed Outer Rim planet today, then at least she could have the satisfaction of taking one of those monsters down with her.

She was going down fast. Ahsoka tried to find pockets of hot air in the storm to buoy her ship, but they were fleeting. The viewport was a dark mass, occasionally lit by lightning strikes that cracked through the atmosphere far too close to her ship for comfort.

An unhelpful memory arose of arguing with her master at the controls of a ship on a similar collision course with hard terrain. She remembered being afraid— for herself, for Anakin, and for all the clones on board. At the time she hadn’t appreciated Anakin’s snark and attempts at wit, but she learned to recognize that that was his own way of dealing with the stress. He poked at her and made jokes, anything to draw her attention, and soon enough she wasn’t thinking about death and war.

But that was a long time ago and everyone on that starship was probably dead now except for her. And she’d be damned if today was the day she joined them in the Force.

Ahsoka steered through the lightning strikes as best she could and searched for a pattern in the wind. Every storm, no matter how big, had a direction for its energy. She could feel it rushing around her, flowing and flowing—

“Got it, R4!” she yelled to the droid, who would never admit it but had been getting increasingly distressed by the turn of events. “Follow my heading.”

Through sheer force of will, she guided the ship out of the buffeting oncoming winds and into an airstream, still pulling sharply down toward the surface. She braced herself in her chair as the ship’s hull made contact with the rocky surface and a loud screech grated against her montrals. They skidded and bumped along the surface until finally inching to a stop.

It wasn’t a perfect landing. More of a controlled crash, really. But she was alive, and her ship and droid relatively intact. The panels on the helm flashed and beeped with an urgency that no longer fit the situation. R4 would need a good scrub after being out in this mess, but as far as she could tell on a cursory glance through, everything was workable.

She’d lost track of the TIE in the storm and so ran a sweep of the planet, or as best she could with all the interference. The storm was a howling mess of ions and who knows what else that seemed specially designed to ruin her day. But there, not two clicks from her position, was a blinking red dot indicating the only other forsaken soul in the vicinity. Though it might be a stretch to assume Inquisitors had souls.

After setting R4 up to repair what he could on the ship, she drew her hood up and released the hatch. It screeched as the bay door fought against the wind and rain, and opened to a scene that looked about as inhospitable as the enemy she now sought. The solid wall of clouds let only a small amount of red-soaked light through to the ground, painting the craggy rocks in a dull and hazy glow. There was little by the way of distinguishing features on this planet. All around her was what looked like solid earth, with boulders and cracks in the rocky terrain strewn about at random.

She pulled her cloak around herself tighter and set off in the direction of the downed TIE.

* * *

“We are not so different, you and I.”

The fight ended before it even began. While Ahsoka had rode down on the air currents of the massive storm, the Inquisitor was not so lucky. One wing of the TIE fighter was smashed and disintegrated, the other protruding from the red dirt it had crashed into. That hunk of substandard ship parts wouldn’t be lifting off this planet anytime soon and she guessed its pilot wouldn’t either. Ahsoka had found her blown free from the wreckage of the TIE, passing for a corpse until further inspection showed some life in her yet. Her pale face was contorted in pain, but her limbs remained motionless on the ground. An indented path through the hard earth showed just how far she’d been thrown and Ahsoka wondered idly if her body had been paralyzed.

“And how is that?” Ahsoka sneered.

She felt a twitch in the Force and Ahsoka raised her lightsaber in time to block a feeble attack from the Inquisitor’s red blade as it was flung through the air. She batted it away like a petulant bug and the circular hilt clattered to the ground out of her attacker’s reach, not that it seemed the woman could do anything more than use the Force with trembling fingers.

“What a shame,” the Inquisitor gasped as Ahsoka put a foot on her chest just in case she got any more ideas. “I was looking forward to a real fight with the infamous _apprentice_.”

“Good, you know who I am. And which of Vader’s dogs do I have the pleasure of meeting today?”

“I am Third Sister,” the dying woman said proudly. A loyal slave to the end, then.

“A pleasure,” Ahsoka replied.

The Inquisitor’s lips quirked in between gasps for breath. “You sensed the death of that brat. I know you did, Jedi. You’re good at hiding your emotions, but no one is that good.”

“I am no Jedi.”

She stared at Ahsoka while she breathed shallowly. “Hmm, perhaps you are right. No Jedi I ever killed was so… cold—” Ahsoka snarled, baring her incisors. “Fear, yes. And _hope_.“ The Inquisitor spat reflexively at the word, and dark blood splattered on her pale cheek. “But all I sense from you is coldness and detachment. Not like your would-be recruit. It’s a shame really, the brat would have made a fine Jedi— or servant of the Sith, with the proper training. He tried to fight me, do you believe that?”

Ahsoka ground her heel further into the place between the Inquisitor’s shoulder and neck. She felt a hollow snap as bones clicked together unnaturally. The woman’s breath stuttered but she made no movement to fight back.

“But one thing led to another…” Third Sister gritted out with feigned nonchalance. “You know how it is, rebel scum, don’t you?”

The Inquisitor stared up at her with wide eyes, the sithly yellow glow slowly fading even as Ahsoka watched. Her gaze didn’t waver from Ahsoka’s face.

“They died for nothing, he and his pathetic parents. But you don’t care about them, you care about the lost _opportunity_ the boy represented. Already you are one of us, even if you do not accept it.”

Ahsoka growled, “I am nothing like you.”

A mix between a cough and a laugh bubbled up from the Inquisitor’s chest, the sound wet and haunting. “Maybe once that was true,” she rasped. “We barely remember the correct feelings for a situation, isn’t that right?” the Inquisitor continued. Looming death made her philosophic, it seemed. “Empathy, compassion, love... It’s all weakness to exploit.”

Ahsoka noticed blood pooling around her motionless limbs for the first time. It spread around the sole of Ahsoka’s boot that wasn’t pressing her sternum into the ground, and mixed with the murky rainwater pelting down on them from above. The liquid was darker than a human’s blood, but she didn’t know if that was a reaction to this atmosphere’s composition or representative of this particular brand of humanoid’s biology.

The Inquisitor chuckled again without humor. “Even now you should be feeling something... Victory, accomplishment?”

There was no reason to argue with a dying enemy and Ahsoka found that she couldn’t even if she tried. She was drained. Tired of arguing and fighting for her place in the universe.

“My master will turn you just like so many others before you,” the Third Sister pronounced.

But this, this Ahsoka would gladly argue. “I will never serve a Sith.”

The woman’s chin jerked in some phantom imitation of a shrug and a wide smile overtook her gaunt face. She stared up from her place on the ground, past Ahsoka, and looked to the roiling storm above them.

“Then you will die, Ahsoka Tano.”

Then the Inquisitor bit down on air, hard. Her jaw was rammed closed with unnatural strength and tendrils of blue lightning spread across her face until her eyes rolled back in their sockets. Ahsoka quickly stepped off her chest and jumped back before the lightning reached her and watched as her enemy died. The body jerked briefly as the last wave passed through it and then was still.

Ahsoka spent a long moment staring at the body of the Inquisitor, longer than a sane person probably would have. She watched as the rain washed the blood and grime away and left behind only a pallid, lifeless form.

The heavy gravity of this planet weighed on Ahsoka’s shoulders until it was a struggle to lift her chest to breathe. She panted as if she actually had done battle with a foe instead of just watching one die. Then she finally deactivated her sabers, and slowly turned and headed for her ship.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Between episodes S1E14 Rebel Resolve and S1E15 Fire Across the Galaxy

“My medics say you refuse treatment.”

Ahsoka didn’t raise her eyes from the cup of amber alcohol in front of her. She’d poured it over an hour ago but hadn’t taken a sip yet.

“There’s no need,” she assured the disturber to her illusion of peace. “I am not injured.”

Commander Sato hummed. He walked into her field of vision slowly, as if approaching a wild animal. She supposed that was an apt metaphor for her. Not quite a rebel, not like the rest of them at least, and not quite a Jedi either. Something… in between. Something _different_.

“Perhaps not,” he allowed.

He’d been strangely preoccupied with her account of the dead Force sensitive and equally dead Inquisitor since she came aboard. It was a distinctly Jedi story, she could admit as much. But Sato seemed oddly… disturbed by her recounting of it when she had debriefed him and the other Rebellion leaders upon her return. They had all been hoping for another Force user to join them, and she understood their disappointment. But they’d had near misses like this before. Many times, in fact.

“Is there something you would like to say, Sato?”

He sat on the bench in front of her in the dimly lit mess hall. It was well after ship night and most of Phoenix squadron had retired for the evening.

“Spectre cell.”

Ahsoka frowned. “What about them?”

“Their broadcast—”

“I already informed Spectre Two that was an unsanctioned operation.”

A _dangerous_ unsanctioned operation that had proved disastrous for them, which saddened though did not surprise her. She’d heard their message, passed along by the Rebellion’s network of comm traffickers, almost as soon as she got her ship up and running after her impromptu stop. Red dust had still covered her skin as she drew her hood over her face to begin her transmission to Spectre Two as Fulcrum.

“We have been given… a new directive.”

“A new directive,” she repeated slowly, suspiciously.

“Their broadcast was heard by quite a significant portion of the galaxy, as far as we can tell,” Sato calmly related. “There has been interest… Hope. Where there was not hope previously.”

“Hope.”

For one heavy second as Ahsoka closed her eyes, she was back on the surface of that unnamed planet. Heavy droplets of blood splattered the Inquisitor’s face as she used some of her last breaths to laugh at the misplaced hope of the Jedi.

There were so few Jedi left already, and though Ahsoka hardly remembered Kanan Jarrus from her life before, he was still part of that idealized memory. She knew the Spectres were proud of the message they had sent, but if this was the cost… She sighed and did her best to release her sorrow into the Force, then downed the inch of whatever shitty alcohol the Rebellion kept stocked.

Sato regarded her as she tapped the tumbler back on the mess table. “They believe they can rescue him?” he asked.

Ahsoka shook her head sharply. “There is no rescue.”

For any of them. They all knew this. Once they were out of reasonable range, they were on their own. And if they could not save themselves, then they were considered lost.

And hope… Hope was not something to be brought into existence by the words of a boy. It either was or it was not. There was reason for it—strategic advantage, increased manpower, starfighters, weapons… Or there wasn’t. And so far in her time in the Rebellion, there was little tangible reason for hope.

She searched for it.

For fuck’s sake, did she search for it. But it was rare and hard won. Too hard, in most cases.

And maybe the search had become its own mission. Even the hope that there _was_ hope…

But no, that was too depressing of a thought, even for her.

Good people like Kanan Jarrus died everyday fighting for this cause and hardly anything came from it. One step forward, ten steps back.

“I understand they have requested guidance from Fulcrum in the situation,” Sato said leadingly. Fulcrum did not exist to hold operative’s hands for tough calls, which Jun Sato well knew.

“Guidance,” she repeated incredulously. There was nothing to guide. One of their team was lost. They should honor his memory and move on with their mission.

He finally sighed and cut through the runabout bullshit. “The Rebellion believes it may be worth backing the Lothal cell in its goal.”

She relaxed a fraction and leaned back on the uncomfortable bench seat.

“Ah.”

They were finally coming to the point of this conversation. Ahsoka knew what it meant if the _Rebellion_ wanted something done. That meant that the powers that be wanted it to happen. The politicians she refused to defer to but was still beholden to. And, more often than not when it came to her missions, one politician in particular.

“He knows that you will likely disagree,” Sato continued, not looking her in the eyes. He hated being a mouthpiece for the rarely seen leadership just as much as she did. “But as Spectre One is an… _unorthodox case_ , he feels it is important to preserve this asset.”

There were many code designations in the Rebellion. Too many if you asked… well, anyone in the Rebellion. And everyone had their own way of referring to the almighty Jedi, whether it be in derision or blind worship.

“ _Unorthodox_ he may be,” she told him. “But the movement does not hinge on one person.”

Though, what she wouldn’t give for just _one_ person. One person who mattered. Whether it be her master, her grandmaster, one of her friends from the old days, or… Well, someone.

But none of them were here.

And she was alone.

Despite her lack of hope, she constantly reminded herself that it truly wasn’t one person that won a war. It was all those people together. _Working_ together. Hope wasn’t discovered, but grown. It was a _state of being_ , lived by many. And though she may feel alone in a personal sense, she was not alone in the Rebellion.

“Perhaps,” Sato said, clearly humoring her.

Ahsoka sighed, “But all the same…”

“All the same… They want Spectre cell secured.”

Bail Organa knew she wouldn’t defy his direct orders. She valued their mutual trust too much, and owed him too much, to ever throw it away.

But that didn’t mean she had to be happy about it.

She slipped into her formal voice, the one she hid behind as Fulcrum. “Understood.”

Sato gave her a commiserating smile. She shouldn’t be so hard on him, really. They were in the same position, if not the same interactions with the outside world. Jun Sato was a known figure in the Rebellion war effort, a Commander in the fleet. He walked among the crew and knew them, and they knew him in return.

Ahsoka Tano was a ghost.

“This may yet be a good thing…” He hesitated as if wanting to address her but was unsure how. No one said her name anymore unless they were trying to kill her. “It could be the push we are looking for.”

She smiled, willing kindness into the gesture even though all she felt was pity.

“But it may also be our deathblow.”

Ahsoka didn’t need to remind him of that, but she did anyway. Maybe it was her own way of distancing herself from familiarity. If there was one thing that was ever present in the mind of someone fighting a losing war, it was the probability of defeat.

Sato studied her for a long moment, then sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. Ahsoka poured herself another splash and held the bottle up in silent question. He waved his hand in assent and she retrieved another cup from the bench beside her and poured him one as well.

“There is something you’re not sharing about your last mission,” he stated tiredly once the cup was in his hands.

The fact that he brought this up only after their official business said much. Very few people in the Rebellion heard her reports and she answered to even fewer. Espionage was not a tactic that held up under scrutiny.

Honestly, she didn’t know where she fell in the chain of command, and didn’t care enough to ask. For the most part she was left to her own devices, for better or worse. But that didn’t mean that she actively tried to keep anything from the wider Rebellion. It was just sometimes easier to not offer up information if it didn’t… pertain to them.

But Ahsoka was tired too. She’d gone on this mission to help someone. To bring this other Force sensitive into the fold— officially for the chance that the child could prove a valuable military asset, unofficially because she knew that being alone and untrained was dangerous.

And look how that turned out.

“The Inquisitor knew of me,” Ahsoka told him. “She used my name.”

_Already you are one of us, even if you do not accept it._

Sato paused with his cup halfway to his lips. “Did she have a chance to relay that information to the Empire?”

“I do not think so. At least, I do not think she recognized me until after we had crashed onto the planet’s surface.”

“Good,” he answered succinctly, then took a drink and failed to suppress a cough.

Ahsoka nodded absently. If she had thought this information presented an imminent danger, she would have included it in her debrief. Discovery was not her concern at the moment.

“But this still troubles you.” He set his tumbler down and the sound of another durasteel cup other than her own clinking against the mess table was enough to draw her attention away from her own spiraling thoughts. As sad as it was, she wasn’t used to not drinking alone.

“How can it not?” she asked somewhat hysterically in reply. “It means that I am still known among our enemies after so many years. Perhaps even that someone knows I live and searches for me.”

Sato shrugged and said reasonably, “We know they hunt Jedi. Perhaps this Inquisitor just happened to study her old Jedi holos more closely than her peers.”

“Perhaps,” she allowed, willing her mind to quiet. There were many possibilities, but Ahsoka didn’t trust that it was so innocuous as that. “But I sense there is more going on. Something is… approaching.”

“In the grand metaphysical sense?” Sato asked with a skeptical brow raised.

Ahsoka smiled. She appreciated when people called Jedi bullshit for what it was. “In the practical sense as well, I believe.”

“Lucky us,” he grunted and tipped the last of his drink into his mouth, managing to get the burning alcohol down with just a wince this time.

She drained her cup as well and leaned back on the bench again. Exhaling slowly, Ahsoka forced herself to lose this air of doom that had settled on her shoulders. “Maybe these are just the ramblings of a paranoid ex-Jedi.”

“Being paranoid is what keeps us alive.”

“Ah, but at what cost?”

She’d meant it as a joke, but it fell flat in the delivery. It was the kind of thing the 501st would’ve found uproariously funny after a couple days hyped up on stims during a campaign. She spent too much time around droids and Imps these days.

Sato shook his head and stacked his cup on top of hers as he stood from the table. “If you won’t sleep, then go deal with Spectre cell. I’ve already got ears listening to comm traffic for a high profile prisoner transfer.”

“No rest for the wicked,” she sighed. This time she wasn’t trying to be funny, but he still chuckled wryly.

“On second thought, get a few hours of shut-eye first. And shake off some of this _Jedi_ stuff.” He walked to a door that would lead him to the command center of the ship, ignoring his own advice despite the tiredness radiating off him. By way of goodbye, he called over his shoulder, “I expect a report in the morning on any plans Spectre cell may already have in the works.”

The door slid shut behind him and Ahsoka watched through the transparent panel of the door as his figure retreated down the white hallway. Then she uncapped the bottle and poured herself another drink.

And a few minutes later when she commed Spectre cell only to be answered by a belligerent droid who informed her of the mess they’d already gotten themselves into while trying to rescue Spectre One… Well, these days nothing much surprised her, but it was certainly an interesting development.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had this all fleshed out and written only to realize I had fundamentally misremembered several key points of these episodes and basically had to redo it (lol) and I still probably got details wrong even after watching them about 3 times (also lol). But I remember thinking back when I first watched Rebels that it was strange the Rebellion basically reversed several very core policies just to save Kanan, and from the way Fulcrum talks to Hera in Rebel Resolve, it really sounds like Ahsoka believed it when she says they can't risk saving him at the expense of the overall mission, something that would probably be a sound attitude to have when you're in a more-or-less hopeless situation type of war. But, again, "kids' show," so 'harsh realities of war' probably wasn't the depiction they were going for...


End file.
